5 Free Design Tools to Elevate Your Brand Assets
5 Free Design Tools to Elevate Your Brand Assets
Getting your branding right as a business owner is key to your overall success. For many entrepreneurs branding is an afterthought unfortunately. Whether it’s because they don’t have a design background, don’t have the budget for it or simply aren’t aware of the impact well thought out brand assets have on potential leads. This article will highlight 5 free design tools to help you elevate your brand assets. Even if you don’t have a design background you can easily leverage these resources. Best of all they won’t take away from your budget.
If you are just starting out your first brand asset is your logo of course. Even if you are looking to rebrand your existing business you’ll need to start with your logo. Your logo will set the direction for all of your other graphic design pieces. Logo Creator is a free application that allows you to design your own logo. As soon as you open the application you are already presented with their editor. To get started select a category and then browse their logo templates. Any of the designs can be customized to your liking. Once you are happy with your logo click download and get access to your logo in JPG, PDF and PNG format. If you want to continue editing at a later point or gather feedback from a business partner click save.
Color choice has a huge impact on how your brand assets are perceived. Colors shouldn’t be chosen randomly or simply by what’s pretty but rather messaging. Make sure you understand what each color stands for and choose the appropriate core color. Color Mind is a great color palette generation tool that leverages AI. Once the site loads you are presented with beautiful color patterns. You can generate random color schemes or upload an image to find the exact colors. In addition you can also enter a specific hex code, such as the core color of your logo, to generate perfectly matching colors.
Another way to elevate any of your brand assets is through the use of professionally shot images. Whether you need images for your website header slider, presentation or poster you can find it on Pexels. This free resource allows you to browse beautiful photography that you can then download with the click of a button. Their license grants personal as well as commercial use, making this a great solution for your business branding needs. You can download the images in four different sizes or enter your exact dimensions.
Another way to give your brand designs a professional touch instantly is through the use of icons. The key is using professional icons and not cheap clipart. FlatIcon is a free resource that allows you to browse and download icons that allow commercial use. They offer over 3 million vector icons in PNG, EPS, SVG and PSD format. Instead of downloading individual icons and mixing and matching in your designs download icon packs. This way your icons will have a consistent look, which will give your brand assets much needed consistency.
No list of free graphic design resources would be complete without including Canva. Canva is a web based graphic design application that’s super easy to use even for non-designers. You could design most of your brand assets with this free resource. Whether you need a presentation, infographic, banner ad or brochure you can find a template here. Their online editor is intuitive and allows you to fully customize any of the templates. Once you are happy with your work you can instantly download it and publish online or print.
A Few Words in Summary
The purpose of your brand assets is to inform and sell all while building brand recognition. It goes without saying the way you leverage graphic design is crucial.
With the free do-it-yourself resources available these days there is no excuse to release subpar branding to represent your business. There are alternatives to the resources listed in this article but this is a good list to fall back on. Now it’s time to put on your creative hat and to give your brand assets a makeover.
- Published by Mike Miller, 4 years ago under Business - Updated 4 years ago
